Neasden F.C.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Neasden F.C. are a spoof football team, the subject of a long-running joke in the British satirical magazine, Private Eye. They were invented by Barry Fantoni to satirize the clichés and hyperbole of football journalism and were once a regular item in the magazine, but now appear only at times of significant public interest in footballing matters.
Neasden's long-running series of defeats, in which they typically fail to score while conceding goals in double figures, have led to many crises for their manager, the "ashen-faced" Ron Knee aged 59, who has often been assaulted by the team's only supporters, the husband-and-wife Sid and Doris Bonkers. Perhaps their most famous player is the one-legged goalie, Wally Foot. Their leading scorer was Baldy Pevsner notorious for scoring own goals. The side are sometimes helped by goals scored by the referee Sid Himmler. The club owned by Brigadier Buffy Cohen, the local dry cleaning magnate.
Many of the reports of their activities are written by E.I. Addio (a reference to football chanting), who is referred to "our man in the stand", "our man in the shower" or a similar description.
The club are based at the Neasden Bridge Stadium, in Neasden, London, and their slogan is "We're on the way to Wembley...You have to go through Neasden to get there". Neasden's arch-rivals in the North Circular Relegation League are Dollis Hill.
Outside of Private Eye the club's name is frequently invoked as a metaphor for amateur or English endeavour as in Coverage of Wikipedia in the popular press veers between two extremes. It’s either the admirable heroics of plucky amateurs - it’s Neasden FC winning the FA Cup - or it’s the latest net threat to civilization. [1]
Neasden is also sometimes home to a fictional university, the University of Neasden. Formerly the IKEA North Circular Polytechnic, the University of Neasden is reported to specialize in "modern" academic fields, such as Diana Studies, Creative Writing, and Flower Arranging. Its proximity to the North Circular makes the University of Neasden a convenient location for students wishing to attend Neasden F.C. home games.
Each edition of the Colemanballs books features a table of the most frequently-quoted persons for the volume, compiled by the 'Neasden Institute of Statistics'.
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